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Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin has entered beta for the 3.0 version. For this release King has reworked the plugin to extend his Social plugin to improve the user experience issues his users have had since Twitter switched to oAuth. We’ve written about troubles users have had with Twitter and oAuth, so perhaps this will be useful for them.

This is a beta, so it hasn’t been tested extensively. Install it at your own risk. You can read more about it at his blog post or grab the code directly from GitHub.

It’s always nice to have diversity in plugin selection. What about you guys, do you have a favorite Twitter plugin to use?

Let’s face it, weeks can get pretty busy. They tend to get even busier around the holidays, so odds are things are just crazy for you this month. No worries though, we have you covered. Below you’ll find a list of the seven most popular posts on WPCandy last week, so you can jump right into the most active discussions and join in.

My favorite last week (despite the release of 3.3 and all the fun surrounding that) was easily the Tetris game and other easter eggs packaged into the Okay Themes website. If you haven’t heard about that yet, do check it out.

Besides these posts, was there something we missed last week? Let us know in the comments.

Things improved for those on WordPress.com last week, when Matt Mullenweg announced enhanced Twitter embedding on their hosted service. That’s awesome for them, but many of you run your own blogs and will care about the other part of the announcement, which is that you can now preview a wp.me link in a tweet without leaving the Twitter website.

Links shortened using the wp.me URL (which is available for self-hosted sites using the Jetpack plugin) will now offer up previews when viewing a tweet on Twitter.com. I took the liberty of testing it out and was very happy with the results. In addition to that, Matt mentioned that linking your Twitter account to your Gravatar profile will now enable a simpler follow button so others can follow you right from that page.

Does anyone here use the wp.me shortened URLs, or do you stick to using your own site’s short links?

Late Wednesday Twitter suspended BraveNewCode’s OAuth token for their WordTwit plugin, which allows users to send out tweets when they publish posts and at scheduled intervals. In plain English, this means that the default settings for WordTwit would no longer function, and anyone using WordTwit would soon realize none of their post tweets were going out anymore.

Twitter suspended the OAuth token without warning, according to BraveNewCode, and cited the following as their reason for the decision:

At the moment BraveNewCode doesn’t see a way to resolve the issue, so they are directing users to use the second setup option WordTwit offers. It involves setting up a Twitter app that will handle the tweeting of posts (instead of using BraveNewCode’s you use your own). The setup process is a bit more complicated, but then again it works where the old way no longer does.

WPCandy was hit by this particular issue last week, since we use WordTwit Pro to tweet out posts as they are published (which probably means I should update this post). I was able to use the documentation BraveNewCode provided to roll out our own Twitter app and get everything back on track in less than an hour, so kudos to them for handling the situation well.

Scott Berkun announced today that WordPress.com blogs now allow the validation of comments via Facebook and Twitter accounts. Users can be signed in to multiple accounts and choose which one they would like identified with their comment.

What does this mean for dot org, self hosted users? Today it doesn’t mean much, but according to Automattic’s Michael Adams, the features will “likely” be added to a future version of the Jetpack plugin. Jetpack was released by Automattic a few months ago and brings WordPress.com features to self hosted WordPress users.

By the way, the WordPress.com team gets extra points for their Fight Club reference in their post image (seen above). His name is Robert Paulsen…

How do you choose to let your users comment on your blogs? Are you interested in easily letting your visitors comment using Twitter and Facebook accounts?

Last Thursday, Twitter launched its official Tweet Button with the aim of simplifying the sharing of content.

Rather than having to switch between tabs or windows and visit the Twitter site directly, users of sites who sport the new button will, upon clicking, be greeted by a Tweet box. The Tweet box will contain a shortened link to the content being shared and allow users to add their own messages before tweeting it. Once tweeted, users will also be given the opportunity to follow other Twitter accounts that publishers choose to share with their followers.